The last hours of 15-year-old runaway Stephanie Ann Bauman’s life were hellish.

Stephanie Bauman, courtesy Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office

Someone or a group of people apparently forced her to disrobe in sub-freezing temperatures on Oct. 28, 1980 near a windmill in rural Arapahoe County. She may have been beaten and sexually assaulted.

At some point, she ran barefoot and nude down a trail and on a dirt road for four miles in a desperate attempt to escape her tormentor.

There was evidence she was followed by a car filled with as many as five people who harassed her and prevented her from seeking help. Exhausted, she fell in a ditch and froze to death after wandering in circles.

“She must have been terrified,” said her sister Cindy Bovell, 49, of Woodbridge, Va. “She probably felt there was no one there in the world for her. It breaks your heart.”

Bauman lived a sad life, her father Robert Bauman, 73, of Missouri said.

“She had a hard life as a youngster,” Bauman said.

When she was young, her parents were divorced and she alternated between living with her mother in St. Louis and her father in Littleton.

While in Colorado, Bauman did the best he could to provide for his three children: a boy and two daughters. He would take them to the grocery store or out camping. He built a play house for them in his back yard, Bovell said.

Although Stephanie did well in school, Bauman was worried that she was using drugs. She ran away from home a few times, saying she was going to her mother’s house.

Finally, Bauman said he placed her in a group home for troubled teen-agers.

Arapahoe County Sheriff’s investigators say the group home had strict rules and Stephanie and a friend ran away.

A pill bottle holding anti-depressant medication was set on the edge of the bathroom sink next to the nearly overflowing tub of water where the body of Rebecca Ann “Becky” Bartee was found. Her head was submerged near the drain.

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Arapahoe County Sheriff’s investigators believed initially that the 41-year-old divorced prosecutor had committed suicide. But as the case unfolded, it became apparent the killer had staged the scene in a cover-up attempt.
Bartee was a prosecutor who had begun working as a supervisor at the Arapahoe County District

recognize her because Marilee didn’t normally wear pony tails and he didn’t
see her face in the dark.

After driving down the road a while, he looked in his rear-view mirror and saw a dark, two-tone pickup truck stop beside the girl.

His sister never made it home.

Thirty-eight years later, the high-profile abduction/rape/murder of a member of the Burt automotive family has never been solved.

The next day highway workers found her nude body under a bridge in a shallow creek in Deer Creek Canyon in Jefferson County. It was found where it was dropped, 6 miles southwest of her home where she lived with her mother.

She had been raped and strangled. A 10-foot rope was discovered near the body. But her clothing, a purse and three text books she had been lugging home have never been found.

The killer hit Marilee Burt in the face so hard it would have caused her to go unconscious.

Investigators found a black hair on the rope but have not been able to match it to anyone over the years.

Names: Elizabeth “Betty” Frye, 45Location murdered: Garage of home at 6696 S. Lafayette St. in present-day CentennialAgency: Arapahoe County Sheriff’s DepartmentDate murdered: June 9, 1973Cause of Deathbeat in the headSuspect: Herbert Frye

Shortly before she died Lolita Frye allegedly told her daughter a family secret: Lolita’s son, Herbert Duane Frye, had confessed to killing his wife two decades earlier, according to court records.

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The revelation sparked newspaper headlines and led 11 years later to murder charges against Frye in 2006, 33 years after his wife Elizabeth “Betty” Frye was bludgeoned to death in her garage in present-day Centennial.

Soon after the 1991 bludgeoning death of Marie Nicholaides, her husband began moving on with his life.

George Neptune Nicholaides, then 36, collected two substantial life-insurance claims and, within months, started living with his personal assistant, Lisa Hunter, who was then 23, said Bruce Isaacson, cold-case investigator for the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office.

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George Nicholaides collected the insurance proceeds even though he has remained a suspect in his wife’s death since shortly after he reported finding her bloodied body just inside the front door of their home on May 23, 1991.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.